Disney Coming Home Write Up

[michelej1]

[Excuse the interruption. Just getting this old stuff online]

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (PA), August 28, 1993


Section: ENTERTAINMENT


DISNEY OFFERING A SUNDAY NIGHT MAC ATTACK


LEE WINFREY, PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER

President Clinton's favorite rock band, Fleetwood Mac, is past its peak of performance. But because a president's preferences always attract attention, Fleetwood Mac is the subject of a 90-minute profile on pay-cable television at 9 tomorrow night.

The host of the Disney Channel's "Fleetwood Mac: Going Home" is the band's drummer, Mick Fleetwood. Thirty-seven songs culled from the band's 18 albums are performed fully or in part.

Like Clinton, Fleetwood Mac has "managed to survive through hellish situations sometimes," as Fleetwood said in an interview last month. Just for starters, guitarist Peter Green, who founded the group in 1967, now has "controlled schizophrenia," said Fleetwood, although "he's got plenty of money to survive."

Green named the band for Fleetwood and bassist John McVie, the only original members who have been aboard for the band's entire 26-year roller-coaster ride. The band's peak period was 1975-87, when Fleetwood and McVie worked with vocalist Stevie Nicks, guitarist-vocalist Lindsey Buckingham and keyboardist-vocalist Christine McVie.

It was this grouping that Clinton invited to Washington to reunite for "Don't Stop (Thinking About Tomorrow)," a Fleetwood Mac song he used as a campaign theme, at a gala the night before his inauguration. Fleetwood said when he first heard Clinton use "Don't Stop" on the campaign trail, he thought, "That sounds like someone has ripped one of our songs off." But later, he said, he was pleased.

"It's not exactly Bob Dylan rhetoric going on" in "Don't Stop," Fleetwood said congenially. "It's basically optimistic, which is very much what the campaign turned out to be." The upbeat chorus, as you can hear tomorrow, goes like this:

"Don't stop thinking about tomorrow/Don't stop, it'll soon be here/It'll be here, better than before/Yesterday's gone, yesterday's gone."

Fleetwood says in "Going Home" that Christine McVie wrote "Don't Stop" for her husband, John McVie, who was feeling bad because their marriage was breaking up. She sings it to him on this special, wishing him well in this verse:

"All I want is to see you smile/Be at your best just a little while/Although you don't believe that it's true/I never meant any harm to you."

"Don't Stop" was a cut on Fleetwood Mac's biggest-selling album, "Rumours" (1977), a time of extraordinary turmoil even when measured against the rest of the band's turbulent history. Nicks and Buckingham were ending their love affair and for her he wrote "Go Your Own Way," another cut on "Rumours," which they duet on in "Going Home."

That didn't stop the couplings, though, not for Fleetwood Mac. Tonight while Nicks sings "Sara," a cut from a later album, Fleetwood says in voiceover, "I was seeing Stevie on a personal basis. Very much in love. It didn't work out. It was just too crazy for both of us."

One of the summits of "Going Home" is Nicks' intense rendition of her signature song, "Rhiannon." Christine McVie runs through several of her songs, including "Get Like You Used To Be" and "Over My Head." And there's some fine picking by the several guitarists who have come and gone during the band's history, including Green, Buckingham, Jeremy Spencer, Danny Kirwan and Bob Welch.

Mostly dormant in this decade so far, Fleetwood Mac hasn't put out an album since "Behind the Mask" (1990). Fleetwood said last month that he was assembling a new band and plans to be in a studio to record another album soon.

"I suppose you'll have to take me and John McVie out and shoot us to get rid of us," he said. After all that he and the Fleetwoods have already been through, he might be right.